Reflexion. Henry Lewis: X-Räume / Reflexion. Henry Lewis: X-spaces / Henry Lewis, X-Spaces
In 1990, “European Photography” published a text by Vilém Flusser on the work of the photographer Henry Lewis: „Henry Lewis: X-Spaces (41/11, 1990: 46-47). In this essay, Flusser discusses the impossibility to experience space with the eyes. We can only reach as far as the surface of objects, he writes, but radiography penetrates beyond the surface into space. Flusser contends that Henry Lewis is not interested in finding out what is behind the surface, but in making the experience of space visible. He is making pictures of the third dimension.
Interwiev with Sam Auinger. On Flusser, Music and Sound
O inóspito: uma pequena arqueologia do conceito de espaço no pensamentode Vilém Flusser
The article proposes an archeology of the concept of space in Vílem Flusser’s thinking. To do so, it reflects on the inhospitable, which refers to space and spatiality. In its Latin etymology, the word comes from hospitalitas, and carries the meaning “condition of the outlandish”, the traveler, the enemy, the nomad. Thus, we think about the inhospitable as a quality of space that houses the hostile, subjecting us to the condition of foreigners who feel the hostility in the space we inhabit. For Flusser, humanity has gone through three major catastrophes, all related to the concept of space. The first is the hominization, a result of the abandonment of the treetops by an animal that came to terms with the ground, making itself more vulnerable to predators. The second is the civilizing process, which ocurred ten thousand years ago, when nomadic man sits and stays earthbound; space is limited and increasingly filled up with others, the guests, who are at heart, hostile. It is the problem of the other. After those ten thousand years of a sedentary lifestyle, our home became so inhospitable that we went back to being nomads; we are confronted by the inhospitable “within ourselves”, subsequently, inaugurating the third catastrophe.
Vernetzung der Welt
My first connection with Flusser was in the place of his birth – Prague. Later in Prague and Zurich I read in magazines many articles by him. The text “Towards a Philosophy of Photography” was very important for me. Vilém Flusser finds in photography a possibility to realize a space of freedom. In that sense, Photography is a starting point for every philosophy. In the text “Kommunikologie weiter denken” Flusser stated: “The space is not only twisted. The space comes to me and I come to him [it]. Time is twisted too. Past becomes future and future becomes past and both are contemporary.” This is the point of view of the graphic Vernetzung der Welt.
